Hello, Bobby

When Scott Litt built a recording studio in back of his house, in Venice, California, seven years ago, he did it with Bob Dylan in mind. He pictured Dylan sitting there at the Hammond organ, accompanied by nothing but drums and a standup bass. Or maybe in an arrangement featuring a banjo and a trumpet. “I always imagined him having a Louis Armstrong ‘Hello, Dolly’ sound,” Litt said the other day. “Musically, that’s as American as it gets.”

Litt, who is fifty-eight and originally from New York, wasn’t a Dylan nut, by any stretch. He’d produced records by R.E.M., Nirvana, and the Replacements, and had worked with the Kinks and the Stones, but he caught a late-career-Bob bug when he heard the 2001 album “Love and Theft.” “To me, it was ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ ” Litt said.

In recent years, Dylan has produced his own albums, under the nom de son Jack Frost, but he sometimes brings in a seasoned producer to serve as recording engineer. Last winter, Litt got a call from Dylan’s representative, who invited him in for a meeting with Dylan, before a gig. “I met Bob in his trailer. He was there with his band. They were playing ‘It’s Too Late,’ by Chuck Willis—rehearsing. I just sat there and kept my mouth shut.” Litt signed on as the engineer for Dylan’s latest album, “Tempest,” which came out last month.

Dylan, alas, never made it to Litt’s house—they recorded the album at Jackson Browne’s studio, up the road in Santa Monica. And when Litt got up the nerve to mention his “Hello, Dolly” idea, it didn’t go over very well. “He just went, ‘Heh heh heh. “Hello, Dolly.” ’ ” Litt’s biggest contribution to “Tempest” may have been a prized pair of old Neumann microphones that he owns, worth twenty-five thousand dollars or so each. They are “omnidirectional”: you can set one up in the middle of the room and record many musicians at once, in the round. It was an unorthodox, old-fashioned approach, but Dylan apparently liked what the mikes picked up. “It created a soundscape, and he kind of fit over it,” Litt said. Dylan’s voice stood out. Litt didn’t mess with it. Listeners will not dispute that few tricks were deployed to enhance it.

Dylan typically listened to the rough cuts in his pickup truck, or else on a boom box, something that Litt had been instructed to provide. “It’s hard to find a boom box!” Litt said. “Then Bob took it when the sessions were over. I thought I’d get it as a souvenir.” After they were done, Litt didn’t hear anything about the record for several months, until he saw press reports that it was about to be released.

Litt had met Dylan once before, more than twenty years earlier. He was producing an album by the Replacements, and Dylan, who was recording nearby, dropped in to check them out—at the very moment, as it happens, that Paul Westerberg, the Replacements’ leader, was launching into a Dylan parody of theirs called “Like a Rolling Pin.” Westerberg, his back turned to the control room, failed to notice Dylan standing there, and Litt, to Westerberg’s later chagrin, didn’t stop him. When the song was over, Dylan, who was wearing a hoodie, said, “You guys rehearse much?,” and then walked out.

“I didn’t bring that up when Bob and I were working together,” Litt said, smiling. He was in his Venice studio, surrounded by his recording equipment, much of it, such as the vintage Neve console, all but obsolete, in a ProTools world. In seven years, he had had only one artist come in to record. “It just kind of goes away,” he said.

He had been spending his time instead at the Boys and Girls Club in Venice, where he’d set up another studio, to teach kids how to have a career in the music business, on the other side of the console. “I’ve seen too many young African-Americans working with Jewish engineers like me,” he said. “It can’t just be us recycled guys.” His top student had been a kid named Oscar Duncan, who started with Litt when he was sixteen and by twenty-three was running the studio. Last June, Duncan, an anti-gang activist, was killed in a drive-by shooting. Stevie Wonder sang at his funeral. “I don’t have kids, but this kid was as close as could be,” Litt said. “My job is to find another Oscar at the Boys and Girls Club.”

He put on some Nat King Cole, for a quick tutorial on ribbon microphones, and then played “Hello, Dolly,” feeding the sound through the Neve, nice and loud. “You still blowin’, you still crowin’, you still goin’ strong,” Louis Armstrong growled, as Litt tapped his feet and wagged his head.